Getting in Touch with Ruby on Rails Developers at RubyConf 2012

As an applications engineer, I work to understand the challenges that our customers face integrating Clustrix into their environments. Really seeing things from a customer’s point of view involves keeping in touch with the developer ecosystems evolving around various application languages and frameworks. Since many Clustrix customers operate Ruby on Rails web properties, we were sure to be on hand at RubyConf2012 from November 1st – 3rd in Denver, Colorado.

The main focus of RubyConf was on a number of interesting sessions and talks. We covered topics from Ruby’s design process, mobile development using Ruby, and refactoring Ruby code to the how Ruby code is transformed into C data structures, site deployment strategies, and QA best practices. The designer of the Ruby language, Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto, gave a great keynote address about the future of Ruby (focusing on the forthcoming Ruby 2.0 release) and encouraged programmers to challenge themselves to solve new problems while having fun developing.

I frequently joined our strategic partner, Blue Box, at its vendor booth to explain how Clustrix powered Blue Box’s Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) offering. I also pointed out the performance gains that one can expect going from single instance MySQL to a scalable Clustrix solution, which I had measured during my testing for the Ruby on Rails Performance Benchmark.

It was evident from speaking with conference attendees that Ruby developers are very proud of their language and online casino see it evolving to an even greater level of importance going forward. Also evident was how friendly Ruby developers are as a whole, eagerly discussing the reasons they love the Ruby language and explaining their companies” business models over end-of-day beers and barbecue. Younger organizations were primarily focused on rapidly transforming their business strategies into fully implemented production code while organizations farther into their lifecycle were concerned with operational details such as scaling their Rails implementations and MySQL databases to meet increased demand. Some attendees who had already sharded their production database were eager to hear more about how they could contain the growing cost and complexity of sharded environments by “repatriating” their database shards within a single Clustrix cluster.

Once the hustle of RubyConf had passed, I took a little time to wander around downtown Denver, taking in sights such as Denver’s US Mint and the 16th street pedestrian mall. The nearby Capitol Hill and Uptown neighborhoods were also interesting, with fun spots such as City O’City and Denver’s version of the beloved Beauty Bar franchise.
Denver, Ruby, and Clustrix – it all turned out to be a pretty excellent combination. We”ll be on the lookout for more ways to stay connected with Ruby and Rails communities going forward.